RIGHT BRAIN DAMAGE AND EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION IN DISCOURSE

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RIGHT BRAIN DAMAGE AND EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION IN
DISCOURSE
Sue Sherratt
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• Verbal communication is ordinarily and normally
  imbued with affective and attitudinal nuances
  (Van Lancker Pachana, 1998, p. 311)

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Why is evaluation important?

• Expresses speakers opinion about something (and
  thereby values)
• Constructs and maintains relations between
  speaker and hearer
• Organises the discourse

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The role of evaluation in narratives

• wards off the question so what?.
• makes part of narrative prominent.
• distinguishes narratives from other stretches of
  talk
• allows the speaker to occupy the floor for longer

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Right hemisphere emotion 2 hypotheses

• RH hypothesis RH is dominant for emotional
  processing
• Valence hypothesis RH is dominant for
  unpleasant/negative emotions.

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RBD and emotional expression

• Emotional expression may be verbal, nonverbal or
  extralinguistic
• RBD investigations focused mostly on nonverbal
  and extralinguistic expression of emotion
• Limited research into RBD and verbal expression
  of emotion

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Verbal expression of emotion and RBD

• Most studies have used rating scales.
• Rated as less emotionally intense, reduced in
  emotionality, less accurate in emotions
  expressed.
• 2 studies of lexical emotional expression
  reduction in emotional content and lower rate of
  affect words.

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Assessment of verbal emotion

• Complex can be explicit or implicit,
  subjective, value-laden.
• Tends to have been sidelined in linguistics
  (Martin 2004)
• Few relevant analysis procedures

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Appraisal (Martin and colleagues)

• semantic resources used to negotiate emotions,
  judgement and valuations, alongside resources for
  amplifying and engaging with these evaluations
  (Martin, 2000, p. 145).
• Forms a prosody of attitude (Martin Rose,
  2003, p. 54) through the sample.

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Appraisal resources

• 3 categories/dimensions
• Appreciation
• Affect
• Judgement
• Amplification for grading the attitudes

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Appraisal Categories

• Appreciation
• how speakers evaluate a text or a process
• What do you think of that?
• Affect
• how something makes them feel
• How do you feel about it?

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Appraisal Categories contd

• Judgement
• evaluation of the ethics, morality or social
  values of peoples behaviour
• How would you judge that behaviour?
• Amplification
• how speakers grade their attitudes towards
  people, things or events.

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Questions

• Are speakers with RBD able to express emotion
  verbally and to what extent?
• What appraisal resources do they use to do this?

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Participants

• community-dwelling British males
• monolingual English-speaking
• minimum of 10 years of education

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7 RBD participants

• Pre-morbidly strongly right-handed
• Single right hemisphere CVA
• Aged 54-77
• TPO 2y6m to 5 y

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10 NBD participants

• right-handed
• matched for age and SES to RBD group

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Narratives

• 2 narratives of personal experience
• Tell me about a frightening/funny experience
  that you have had at any time in your life

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Total appraisal resources ( total words)
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Total appraisal by topic (total words)
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Appraisal resources used ( of total appraisal)
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Appraisal by topic ( of total appraisal)
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Appreciation affect ( of total appraisal)
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Judgement amplification ( of total app)
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Conclusions

• Relative, not absolute, differences between
  groups
• RBD tended to use less, particularly for negative
  topic
• On positive topic, RBD and NBD similar.
• On negative topic, RBD appraised things more than
  expressing feelings

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More questions than answers

• Effect of discourse genre?
• Specific/personally relevant negative topic?
• Other factors?
• Limitations of this study?

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Final comments

• Attitudinal analysis will never be completely
  clear-cut and are still being developed
• Appraisal framework used has considerable merit
• Evaluation plays a constructive role in
  organising sociality how we share feelings in
  order to belong (Martin, 2004, p, 341).

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RBD and social integration

• The difficulties of people with RBD in emotion
  processing have marked effects on interpersonal
  interactions (Lehman Blake, 2003).
• People with RBD are considered to be
  disconnected from the world around them (Myers,
  1999) and as having a social handicap at least
  as significant as aphasia (Paradis, 1998)

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Thank you